All posts tagged "google"

Monday, February 15, 2010

"Google released a new version of Chrome for Mac OS X on Thursday that restores a key feature, extensions, that had been missing for weeks."

According to Chrome programmer Mark Mentoval, "With this new version, you'll be able to install any of over 2,200 extensions (and counting!) currently available in Chrome's extensions gallery." This version also fixes some Adobe stability issues as well as including some new multitouch support. The new beta version should get some Firefox users to switch now that it has extensions I would imagine. You can download the latest beta version here, and if you currently are using Chrome, they expect an automatic update within the next few days. Still not sure? Check out the Macworld run through of the latest beta here.

Friday, February 5, 2010

"Today Google is kicking off its third installment of Doodle for Google, a yearly nationwide art contest for students in grades K-12. Eligible students can submit their own "Google Doodles," and the winning Doodle will appear on Google's homepage for one day. Plus the winner and his or her school will receive money and scholarships."

This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." The idea, obviously, is to get those kids dreaming about what they would do or want to do in their future. You can get all the details at the official site and the school registration deadline is March 17th, with a deadline of submissions on March 31st, 2010. Cool contest.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

"Google Jan. 29 said it would cease fully supporting Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 for its Google Docs and Google Sites applications March 1. This pledge extends to other older Web browser versions, including Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Apple Safari 2.0, as well as Google's own Chrome 3.0. The move is Google's push to rid the messaging and collaboration world of the dated, insecure IE6 and put Google Chrome in its place. Chrome has 4.63 percent of the browser market and would love to chomp away at IE's 63 percent share."

Doesn't seem on the surface to be anything as sinister as forcing their way into marketshare, appears to me like its natural progression of things as software advances. But I suppose since IE 6 has over 60% of the market for browsers that it would be natural to assume Google was up to some skullduggery wouldn't it? What are your thoughts?

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

"Mail storage is the organizational conundrum of the early 21st century for many longtime Mac users. On your hard drive, you probably have an e-mail archive literally dating back to the last century, containing a few thousand irreplaceable, keep-forever messages in an ocean of saved detritus. Searching is a pain, but "reorganizing" your archive is a fate worse than death, so you've gamely stuck to your system-until now, when Google Email Uploader for Mac presented a viable alternative."

You can check out the uploader here, but note that there are a couple of "wait, read this before you do it" elements. It doesn't upload to gmail or google mail accounts, only those that are hosted by Google Apps for your domain. And it requires Mac OS 10.4 or higher. But it will upload from Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Eudora, automatically finding the archives and uploading them. If you have more than 500 messages, however, it may take some time (the author noted it would take the program about 69 hours to do it all once he started the process).

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

"New photos and a hands-on description have compared Google's custom-built Nexus One handset, rumored to be for sale to the public next month, with Apple's iPhone. Jason Chen of Gizmodo received some hands-on time with the hardware thanks to an anonymous source. He called the long-rumored, supposed Google Phone a 'Droid killer' -- ironic, because Motorola attempted to position its Droid, which launched in November, as an 'iPhone killer.'"

The video is a little shaky, so it is hard to tell the quality of the phone and it's screen which Chen calls "probably the best screen we have seen on a smartphone. Probably." But the screen doesn't have multi-touch, there is mediocre quality on music playback and they didn't test the phone aspect of the device. So still some unknowns. The phone is supposed to go on sale in early 2010.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

"Apple might not be convinced but Google Latitude is actually a nice tool. If you've never heard about it it's a Google web-app that lets you share your location with your friends. Its main issue however is that it requires you to update your location manually, which kinda kills the purpose."

You can fix this on your jailbroken iPhone by installing an app called Longitude via the RockYourPhone installer. The app is $2.99 USD after the 10 day free trial period, and it can be set to update your location in an interval you configure. This would be a nice alternative to MobileMe and the Find My iPhone option, if my iPhone was jailbroken.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

"As promised, the Google Chrome for Mac beta has just made it in under the wire for a 2009 release. Of course, it's still just a beta, not a first release-and, as we know, it's missing some features-but it's a step beyond what we've seen so far."

A little over a week ago we posted a report that said it was coming out soon, and now it has. Google Chrome for Mac Beta is now available for download. The download is 17.6MB and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later as well as an Intel processor.

Monday, December 7, 2009

"We keep seeing more and more geolocation aware or augmented reality twitter apps, but if it's getting too confusing to you why not simply use the built-in maps application?"

If you care about tracking where they tweets are coming from, geographically that is, simply pull up your map on the iphone and enter the following:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[the username].rss

Obviously you want to replace [the username] with the name of the tweeter, then it will track on your map. Not sure I'd ever need this, unless, like the article says, I was on a manhunt for a twitter fiend.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

"We know that a beta version of Chrome for Mac is due at least by the end of December, but today brings more confirmation that it may be even closer than that. Mike Pinkerton, the guy leading the Chrome for Mac team, has just tweeted out that there are only '8 remaining M4 Mac beta blockers! Go team!'"

Even better now, if you check out the status page it only shows 5 bugs remaining. So it appears that it is on track for the December, correction "early" December release that was talked about on the Google Groups page. Anyone out there going to switch and move to Chrome, or at least give it a try?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

"One of the hottest trends right now is the rise of location-based services (LBS), which helps friends network and find each other based on their location. Foursquare and Loopt are prime examples of these growing networks."

And now Google is getting involved, but contrary to the commercial, they don't have an app for that. However it does work with Google maps via the web browser. Or to make it easy you can get the Google app and access it there. I'm thinking since most of my friends have a Gmail account, this may be a good option for me. What are your thoughts? Have you given this a try yet? Are you?

Monday, November 2, 2009

"Confused about how to use Google Wave, the new Google product that combines messaging, wiki-like features and group collaboration into a single app? You're not alone."

I'm not confused but I'd like to be so if someone out there has a Wave invite that is burning a hole in their hard drive give me a shout out! Regardless, this is a nice primer on just what you can do with Google Wave, and it appears some enterprising folks have wasted no time in learning about Wave since there is already a book out on the subject.

Friday, October 23, 2009

"Virgin America and Google are teaming up to make holiday traveling more bearable. The search giant is subsidizing in-flight Wi-Fi service on the airline for the holiday season, from November 10 through January 15."

The normal price for the in-flight internet is $5.95 to $12.95 USD per laptop, or 5.95 to $7.95 USD for handheld devices, cost depending on the length of the flight. So if you fly during this period, and you may want to fly Virgin because of some of the great deals, you get free Wi-Fi courtesy of Google and Virgin America. You can get more info on the offer from Google, or more info on the in-flight Wi-Fi by visiting the Virgin America site.

Friday, September 25, 2009

"The popular RSS reader has received official updates to the Mac and iPhone versions that support Google Reader syncing and, in the case of the iPhone version, a completely redone UI. They are both also back to the ad-supported (or paid, whichever you prefer) model that NewsGator ditched in 2008."

The paid version for Mac is only $10.00 USD now, a drop of $20.00 USD from the original price. The only difference is you see a small ad in the corner of the free version, not at all annoying in my opinion. The iPhone also gets a free and paid ($1.99 USD) version, and all of them sync with your Google Reader account.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

"Google released an update for Chrome to fix compatibility problems with Snow Leopard on Monday, which along with other fixes shows the gradually maturing state of the Mac OS X version of the browser."

I pretty much stick to Safari, although I did download Opera 10 to give it a try. The main reason for Safari for me is the integration with the iPhone and bookmarks. But if you are a Chrome user, brave soul that you are since its not out in even beta form yet, version 4.0.203.4 is now available to fix some minor problems with a garbled text bug when used with Snow Leopard. If you want to experiment with it, Google has more info on their Chrome page.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

"The latest beta of NetNewsWire 3.2 includes the oft-requested support for Google Reader. In fact, NewsGator is ditching its online feed reading and synching service and transitioning all of its clients to use Google Reader."

I've used the online feed reader for a number of years, and it works perfectly with the iPhone app. So I wasn't too happy about this functionality ending on August 31st this year. From what I understand though, I can still use the iPhone app to see my feeds but I need to use either Google Reader or the desktop NetNewsWire instead of the web page. And as an alternative I can use the Google app (even though it only links to the web pages) that consolidates a number of its services. I'm still trying to get Times to work correctly so I'm still up in the air as to what I'm going to use at this point. But I did transfer all my feeds to Google using the handy instructions provided so all is not lost.

Monday, July 27, 2009

"Google has launched a version of its Latitude-a sort of GPS-powered friend finder-for the iPhone. Unfortunately, it seems it was banished to web app-only ghetto by Apple."

This unfortunately is web-based so it won't take advantage of the "push notification", and initially it will only be available in the U.S., New Zealand, UK, Canada and Australia. It would have been really cool if this could have been part of the Maps app that comes on the iPhone. I tried something similar called Loopt, and really never got much out of it, so I don't think this will appeal to me. Anyone out there excited about this? Or do you use something else?

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

"Today we're introducing a major revision to Gmail for mobile that takes advantage of the latest browser technology available on iPhone and Android devices. We've updated the user interface, made it faster to open messages, allowed for batch actions (like archiving multiple messages at once), and added some basic offline support Despite the advent of 3G networks and wifi, smartphones still lack a high-speed, always-on broadband connection and can have connections far less reliable than their desktop brethren. So, just like when we redesigned the Gmail for mobile client app last October, we've gone back to the drawing board and redesigned Gmail for the mobile browser to overcome some of these limitations. We made performance more consistent, regardless of connection type, and laid the foundation for future improvements."

My mobile life and most of my desktop revolve around Google services included G-Mail and Google Reader. When it comes the iPhone, I've always used the built-in mail client for my G-Mail access, but I've always preferred G-Mail native clients like their mobile Java one for feature phones and smart phones. That being said, the new web version is so good you may be willing to part with your integrated clients altogether. It's fast, looks great, works perfectly, and gives you all the functionality you've come to know and love from G-Mail. They've done some nifty caching stuff to compensate for the general instability of a cellular data connection and it makes a huge difference over previous versions of G-Mail mobile.

It may not be for everyone, but you should give it a look. You might be surprised at how good it actually is.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

"I admit it. I check Google out all the time when I need some information. It's a good habit, and I feel better informed. If you are a juror, however, you can be a wee bit too informed. The New York Times is reporting jurors with web enabled cell phones are doing their own research, Googling lawyers names, more information on defendants and even research into claims made by witnesses."

Interesting story. The legal system versus technology? I think it is more of people being human and not being able to resist temptation. Or they are just stupid? Whatever the case, the judge gives pretty clear instructions on what you can and cannot do when you leave the court, and they count on the juror to do the right thing. The fatal flaw! It is obvious from the cases here as well as in this New York Times article that you cannot trust that people will do the right thing. If they did, you wouldn't need a criminal justice system and I would be out of a job!

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

"On Monday, Google announced that it'd now be offering over-the-air synchronization of Google contacts and calendars with the iPhone, iPod touch, Windows Mobile-based phones, and SyncML-compatible devices."

If you don't have Mobile Me, and have been syncing your iPhone with your Google Calendar the old school way via direct connection with your computer, this might be a good option for you. It is a beta, and currently only allows syncing contacts and calendars, so your mail still has to be handled separately via IMAP or POP. Also, there are known limitations with the iPhone so Google has created a site that lists them.

I have Mobile Me, have for years, and I've finally gotten it to where it works pretty well for me so I won't be changing it up by switching. However, if I didn't have Mobile Me and wanted to wirelessly sync my contacts and calendars, I would probably give this a try.